Winter: The Season of Poverty

The opposite season to Autumn is Winter. With the cold temperatures and less hours of sunlight, plus the absence of regular rain, plants and animal without shelter will die. Many animals simply won't make it until the Spring unless they're very lucky and can forage and find some source of food and water. People often criticize deer hunting, but if you've ever seen starving deer suffering, then you'll see why applying our ethos upon Mother Nature seldom works.

Old farmers often have remarked to me that snow is “poor man's fertilizer”. That moisture while far less than regular rainfall, will keep older plants going long enough into the Spring. If not, then perennials stand to die, and given the drought conditions have not abated, we're going to have to pray that the Autumn rains come.

Now imagine a collapse in Winter. Imagine no water and sewer system. With little to no rainfall, there's only snow, and it takes a lot of inches of snow to equal one inch of rain. In a collapse, you always fill up water reservoirs, but particularly in Winter. Then too, you've got to plan for an absence of electricity and natural or propane gas, and potential freezing issues.

There's very little foraging that can occur during winter. Except for pine needles to prevent scurvy, there's not many plants that can sustain the cold. They'll last for a bit, and if you don't harvest what you can, then they're gone until next year.

As the ground freezes, it then become impossible to dig for wild roots. Even if you did manage, it's very likely that all the cattail will either be eaten or nibbled upon by voles and other rodents.

Many animals hibernate either by dramatically reducing their activity, and hence their caloric needs, or sleeping most of the time. They've been smart and using instinct, have stored up food supplies in their burrows and warrens, and built them near water sources. Even then some die from disease and starvation.

Only desperate animals travel out in search of food, and then it's a toss-up whether the search for food exceeded the amount of calories they burned. Those are the few game animals you'd be hunting and trapping and fishing. Since your body is much larger, you're expending even greater amounts of energy while milling around and hoping to flush out an animal. Since you're cold and struggling to stay warm, and possibly walking across snow and ice, then there's a good chance of injury. Worse, you might get lost, and that's deadly in wintertime. This means that realistically, one must curtail most activities for foraging and hunting in Winter during a collapse.

In older times, soldiers hated fighting in Winter. They always ran out of food, and went hungry, and ended up pillaging from farmers' homes to get enough to eat, and still became very malnourished and not fit for war. Depressed immune systems always caused sickness, and living in less than hygienic circumstances resulted in contagion.

The worst possible thing would be having to bug out then. People are not used to hiking 10 miles on a clear path in Springtime. Imagine crossing across winter terrain with small children, and then having to make shelters using what little insulating material you can find and endlessly trying to burn enough fire wood to stay warm. Yes, tribal people did it, but mostly they weren't nomadic in Winter, deliberately choosing to relocate to a known safe area and put up semi-permanent structures that were located near water and supplies and plenty of firewood.

Maple syrup and acorns kept them alive, but sometimes just barely, as the food ran out. This meant living off of fat stores on their bodies, but they were lean people since food was always scarce. If they'd had a lot of children in the Spring, and if the harvest had been bad, or if they'd been raided by another tribe, then their supplies were very low, and the tribe could easily die.

Yes, there are some things you can forage in the early Springtime, but they are very limited, mostly nibbles not meals. From mid-November to mid-May, one could have great difficulty located and foraging food. Even if you planted in mid-March, you'll have very limited foods coming in the garden until May. Yes, you can plant greens and harvest cabbage family plants (like broccoli), but they're not caloric dense food sources.

In mid-February, on warm days, you'll seek many small game animals, but you might be terribly weak by then to trap them. If you've been starving all Winter due to lack of supplies, hunting would be pretty much out as you're probably going to be stuporous and collapse from lack of adequate blood sugar.

This is why I've spent hundreds of pages trying to help you cope by learning skills but also preparing a food and water cache. Winter will be the worst time to cope and a time of true poverty.